Meandering Thoughts on Being Barefoot
In the warmer months, I don't wear shoes very often. I keep a pair of slip-on shoes in the car for when I go to the store. I always felt like it was a really good idea to not wear shoes. When I lived in Philadelphia I tried it out but city dirt ultimately is a different dirt and I opted for shoes. But out here I encounter forest dirt, mostly. The pioneering herbalist Juliette de Bairacli Levy called it “clean dirt” and I know what she means, forest dirt is clean dirt. My feet have calluses and sometimes cuts and some nice clean dirt. They are good, useful feet.
When I learned about “grounding” or “earthing” it made a lot of sense to me. The idea behind these terms is simply to have contact with the Earth without shoes, or with grounding shoes, or to use a grounding mat or something similar. I sort of wish it wasn't so popular to use these speciality terms for things that are so natural. Walking barefoot is simple, straight forward and completely natural, it doesn't seem necessary to call it “earthing” or “grounding,” but I digress. When I talk to people about health and wellness, I often don't think to mention being barefoot because I don't think of it as a wellness activity done intentionally – maybe that's why people came up with other terms for it, so it could be more prescriptive and intentional. At any rate, it's better to be barefoot than to wear shoes, when you can. Our bodies are constantly pulsing their own electromagnetic frequencies, it makes sense that we're built to pulse those frequencies in relationship to the Earth and it's own frequencies. It makes one wonder how much illness could stem from a lack of this most basic contact.
I consider myself a healthy person, I have good energy and rarely catch illnesses and I've wondered how much of this is outside of my control and how much is in relation to various habits I've formed, a lot that I don't even think about. The water I drink – spring water, the physical exercise I do regularly because it's built into the life I lead, the simple foods I eat, the relationships I have with animals and people, the thoughts I think, and walking barefoot regularly - among other things.
I view “health” broadly as having a positive, reciprocal, honorable relationship with the natural world - that is, not fighting against illness, or bugs, or plants, or wildlife, or any living thing including ourselves, but rather working with it all and understanding all things as having their own place in this world. So walking barefoot is part of just simply being in this world and acting as a part of it, embracing wildness, the reality of my animal-ness, and allowing an ouch-y here and there, reveling in some unpredictability, and the soft forest floor as a welcome home to my toes.
Side note – my feet have been in instagram posts (not because I planned it but because I'm often barefoot) and this has attracted an interesting crowd. I've started erasing instagram comments. I’ll be honest, this didn’t even occur to me as an area I would need to be policing. No judgment regarding personal preferences, but maybe keep those kinds of comments off the videos and images for a wellness center, haha - YouknowwhatI'msayin?